Kat Dancing

Hello, and welcome to the Blog Meme Interview. Kellie will be today's interviewer. And here are her five questions for me:

1. What's the best thing you've read in the past 12 months?

I can't seem to formulate a clear answer to this one, in part because I haven't been doing as much reading this past year as I usually do, in part because I'm not good at picking favorites, in part because my reading of late has been affected by my writing. But I can do a top five, in no particular order:

Ursula K. LeGuin's The Other Wind. This was an insanely beautiful story, with all the skill and wonder that LeGuin seems to inspire in me; the first book I've read that made me feel dragons flying. I know she's not for everyone, but damn.

Walter Jon Williams's Praxis. This is a lovely space opera series that doesn't seem to be getting much distribution in the US, which is a damned shame, because it's a fantastic book and shows signs of being a great series. Utterly gripping stuff: I literally could not put this book down.

China Mieville's The Scar blew my mind. It's an immensely dense book, like Perdido Street Station, but I was able to feel a lot more of a connection with the characters in this book, and again, the sensation of the world was so intensely rendered that I couldn't believe it. I spent about a week after reading this book sorting through the emotions it had produced in me. That's a good thing.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls is the best damned story that I have read in a long time. The woman can do story. Exquisite and friendly and funny and deeply moving all at the same time.

And, finally, this is cheating a bit, because I actually discovered Ellis Peters's Cadfael series last year - but I've read quite a lot of them in the past twelve months. It's saying something when you get to the end of a mystery and think, "I want to read that again." Again, characters, setting, feel. God, I wish I could write like these people.

2. On a nice nature walk, you stumble across the end of a rainbow and its requisite pot of gold. A leprechaun emerges from said pot to inform you - with a wicked grin - that the gold cannot leave the 2 ton pot and that the money carries a horribly disfiguring curse, but it's all yours just the same. Assuming you have the perfect plan to outwit the little imp, what would you do with the money?

Considering the terms of the curse, I think cosmetic surgery had better be at the top of the list. And I think I should offer everyone insane amounts of money for whatever I want them to do, then tell them there's just one catch: they have to collect their fee from the source....

Other than that, erm, well. Huh? Money is not something I think about a lot. It would be nice to have a house somewhere cool, like New Zealand, and the money not to worry about getting all my books there. And the money to buy whatever I wanted in bookstores, my god, heaven. Other than that... um. Give it away, probably; money to my parents to pay off their debt, money to my bro, since he's always been much better at spending it than me, money to at least one other person I can think of that really deserves not to be worrying about money... and then I suppose I'd find some deserving cause and donate the rest to it.

I honestly can't imagine being rich, though. It seems like to stay rich you'd have to care about money, and that sounds like a waste of my time.

3. Someone I work with wears the same outfit everyday. Well, I don't see her everyday, but the twelve times I've seen her in the past two months, she's been wearing the exact same outfit. I'm obsessing over this: maybe she was wearing black leggings last time and today's are most certainly navy, or maybe a deep brown; were the flowers on that shirt purple or pink last time; does she just have a boring wardrobe; does she wash this one outfit every night and do I dare get close enough for a sniff test; should I plan a stakeout of her desk so I can observe her daily wardrobe; and so on and so forth. What brings out the obsessive-compulsive thinker in you?

I have a tendency to analyze song lyrics which drives my brother wild. Same with books. Four years of (admittedly excellent) English training has rendered me sensitive to themes, motifs, undercurrents, all those English-major type things, to an idiotic degree. I can no longer read Robert Jordan novels, for example, because there is a strong sexist undercurrent (which I suspect the author himself is entirely unaware of, but never mind - it bugs me.) As a matter of fact, come to think of it, I analyze everything obsessively, including my own behavior. I am highly sensitized to nuance. It's not a good habit, really, and leads to a lot of unnecessary angst and trouble, and occasionally some very great acts of silliness.

4. An old school pal has come a long way since the Pimple Days. She's invented a machine which allows you to travel to any world any fiction author has ever created - fantasy, science fiction, horror, alternate history, anything. And she wants you to take it for a test drive. Where would you go and what would you do there?

I'm never good with these questions. I like my own world just fine, thank you, I've never felt the urge to live somewhere else, or at least not more than I already do in my imagination. I don't think I'd fit anywhere else.

That said, the kind of place I'd like to visit would be a science fiction setting (I have entirely too much knowledge of history to even want to visit the Middle Ages, which is where most fantasy is set), one with easy starflight. I would love to see space; would love to see and explore and just be in space. And none of this forty-year-journey stuff, either; as a story device I admire it, but in the practical sense it's just annoying. There would need to be aliens - wonderfully exotic and strange creatures to meet, talk to, experience. Real aliens, too, none of your Star Trek fancy masks.

As such... hmm. Probably... and I hate to say it, because it's tv and not book... but the setting for Farscape. Yeah, yeah, I know, but for me it's got just the right balance of the familiar and the weird, and beyond that, there's an immense sense of space to the Farscape setting - of infinite variety and adventure. Most science fiction settings end up feeling cramped and repetitive to me.

Also, I would really love to live on a Leviathan.

5. After your journey to Any Fictional World, your friend asks you to play lab rat once again. This time she shows you her time machine. She's still working out the kinks, so you can only use it to travel along your own timeline. That is, you can only go back and revisit events in your life or go forward and see what you'll be doing in the future. Do you go back in time or forward, and what do you see there?

Well, I wouldn't want to go forward - okay, I might want to visit my own wedding and see who the groom was, or go far enough ahead to see my kids, or find out whether I ever got a book published, and if so which one - but you know, knowing those things for sure would only lead me to try and skip essential steps getting there. And even if I couldn't, well, it's like skipping to the end of the book and reading the last few pages really. The uncertainty and anticipation isn't half the fun: it's all the fun.

On the other hand, the idea of visiting anywhere in my past fills me with nothing more than a vague sense of embarrassment.

Really, when you think about it, time travel is a shitty idea. We humans can barely function in three dimensions.

I suppose I might go back to my early childhood - not to do anything in particular, just to observe. I was a real hellion then, by my mother's account, and I've always kind of regretted not being able to really remember all the fun I had when I was still fierce and fearless and unstoppable.

And the meme:

The Obligatory Rules of this Exercise:

1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

So - anybody wanna interview?